Reading Matter Oh, Lampoon!

MARTY KAPLAN is a nice guy.

(Note: Martin H. Kaplan '71 is president of the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine.)

I know this because he's always doing nice things for people. Take freshmen. When the current junior and senior classes were freshmen, most of the junk mail they received from Harvard before they arrived in Cambridge was invitations to join the various branches of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps, a government-sponsored military training program which used to be offered for course credit at this University; the remains of its former headquarters can be observed up Francis Avenue, along with the remains of the Harvard Faculty still residing in Cambridge).

This year each member of the Class of '74 received instead an advance copy of the year's first Lampoon. Some sort of cruel joke, surely.

"No," Marty assured a CRIMSON reporter, "actually, we just did it to be nice."

"A clever advertising ploy, then," the reporter suggested, "to get Mommy and Daddy to subscribe."

"No," Kaplan said. "There wasn't even a coupon in it."

"Well what's so funny about sending a copy of the Lampoon to all the incoming freshmen?"

"It wasn't meant to be funny," he said murderously. "It was meant to be nice."

"It was nice."

"We thought so."

Is it possible to be nice and funny at the same time? The current Lampoon succeeds in both where earlier issues so often achieved neither.

As usual, the parodies of other publications are the strongest pieces. The best one is that of the CRIMSON's own Confi Guide. Unfortunately, this one was cribbed almost word-for-word (and sketch-for-sketch) from a Poon of several years ago. But the University Gazette takeoff is marvelous; it captures that publication's "optimistic and resolute" hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil tone as the world collapses around it. An imaginative Harvard Register parody attempts to portray the Dean of Freshmen as an old-fashioned aristocrat. Their Courses of Instruction is weak, not even as funny as the real thing. (Did anyone catch German 276, "Eroticism in Jugendstil Literature," described as: "Erotic motifs central to the Jugenstil period [together with death, water, and plant themes]. The ambivalent attitude of writers toward society."?)

IN A PLEASANT but largely unconvincing journal of a Yale coed, Marty Kaplan (who seems to have put out this issue almost single-handedly) gives credence to the currently popular notion that it's impossible for a man to imagine what it's like to be a woman (or for that matter for a Harvard man to know what it's like to be a Yalie). And congratulations are due, incidentally, for having succeeded in putting out an entire issue without a single joke about women's lib.

An "Advice-On-How-To-Succeed-At-Harvard" satire is tired; the Ibis piece is pointless as usual (I just hope it's some sort of in-joke). I'd be convinced this later genre is innately sterile except for a truly charming example Kaplan produced last Spring. At the risk of seeming anal, let me point out that a feature composed of fake postcards ostensibly meant to trick freshmen into sending their radical intentions to various bad guys of the right has the addresses on the wrong side when you flip the page.

There's not much you can say about a funny Lampoon. If it's not funny, you can be as sarcastic as possible, to try shaming them from ever publishing again (a campaign the CRIMSON has been waging without success for 94 years). But what do you say if it's funny? You don't want to steal their best jokes. You just hope people will take your word for it when you tell them it's a very nice issue.